When I was a kid I used to absolutely love peanut butter and jelly. My mom would make it for me everyday for lunch for school and it was the same way every time; peanut butter and grape jelly. But, as time went on and I got older, I started to become sick of eating the good ole PB&J and started to hate the taste all together. Now I can’t stand it at all and it kind of makes me sick.What I’ve started to observe is that, you could compare PB&J to the modern day church and God’s love. Before I get into this, I would like to say that I believe that God’s love is one of the biggest and most important understandings of God’s attributes that could ever be. God’s love is what drives all and encompasses all. But, what I am saying is that if we keep continuing in the direction the church is going, Christians are going to start to become sick of PB&J real quick.I’ve gone to many churches where the main topic of 90% of their messages is this: “God loved us and sent Jesus to die on the cross for our sins and because of that we are to love other people.” While that is a VERY true statement, and many people need to get this straight really quickly before they harm the church even more, there are many more topics that need to be discussed and aren’t being discussed, which is causing a really big problem.If you talk about a topic too much one of two things happen:1) People leave the church because they get tired of the same sermon repeated a bunch of different ways.This is obviously bad because people should be coming to church and pastors should be mixing up their sermons so that people feel like they are learning something and that they have a reason and desire to come to church.2) They become numb to the truth within the topic that is being repeated.This point is especially bad because once you become numb to something it is hard to become un-numb to something. Like I said before, the truth that God loves us and we are to love others is so crucial to the Christian faith that if we become numb to this truth, then we’ve missed (what I believe is) the core of the Christian faith.Pastors especially, don’t allow your sermons to become like a PB&J sandwich and have people either leave or become numb to the fact that God loves and we are to love others. Mix up your sermons. Speak on the hard things in life (ie. homosexuality, greed, sexual immorality, etc.) and be unapologetic about it. If you allow for different sermons to be spoken to your congregation, you will enlighten people on other truths in the bible and it will also allow people to learn new things that aren’t normally talked about in the American church today. Be different and mix things up.-Justin Hatton

"Justin Hatton is a guitarist in the band called I Shot The Albatross and has his own blog where he talks about many Christian related topics whether it's church growth, or the growth in one's self in general. For more articles by Justin, check out his blog! (http://www.justinhatton.com)"

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